Tuesday, January 31, 2006

In his State of the Union address this evening, President Bush proposed changes to the tax code that would benefit the nation's family historians.

"These people," said the President, "work hard. It's hard work genealogic. . .alizing, and it's time that we recognize the sacrifices they make every day."

If approved by Congress, Bush's plan would make genealogical expenses such as database subscriptions and microfilm rental fees tax-deductible, and would allow genealogists to claim their deceased ancestors as dependents.

At one point in the speech, President Bush gestured toward a woman seated beside the First Lady.

"Up there in the gallery is a lady named Millie Newman. She's a genealogist from Clarkdale, Arizona. Millie wrote me a letter . . . said she spends $2,000 a year researching her family history. One day her daughter—five years old—comes up to her and asks why they only eat two meals a day. Millie had to tell her daughter they couldn't afford breakfast because of the high price of photocopies. That's just not right, and it shouldn't happen in America."

The plan was immediately attacked by Democrats, who accused the President of kowtowing to lobbyists in the genealogy industry.

"It's the same old story," said Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). "This is just like when he gave Ancestry.com a no-bid contract to rebuild the 1890 census."

By David FinkelWashington Post Staff WriterTuesday, January 31, 2006; A01

RANDOLPH, Utah -- To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

[snip]

"Hey, Aaron," [restaurant owner Pat] Orton says, and in comes a young man who is 16, and who is considered one of Rich County's three African Americans even though he considers himself a mix of a white mother and black father.

He spells his last name: "C-H-E-N-E-Y."

"Yeah," he says. "Distant relatives." His grandmother did the genealogy and explained the connection. He has no idea if it's true, he says -- but even if it is, the reason he likes Bush has less to do with that than with his mother's decision to come to Randolph when he was 8 years old.

"I enjoy pushing cows, chasing girls and shooting guns," he says of who he has become here.

State law requires a funeral home to keep cremains for 60 days; they then can be placed in a grave, niche, crypt or disposed of "in any other lawful manner." The crematory, not the funeral home, is legally obligated to keep a record of who is cremated, when and to whom the cremains are delivered.

So there is nothing, outside of conscience and reputation, to stop a funeral home from flushing the unclaimed human ashes that it receives. But both are big considerations.

"To us, these are people, even though they are in small containers," [Cress Funeral and Cremation Service president Bill] Cress says. "I don't care if some were homeless, or considered despicable."

I say "might be" because I'm not willing to fork over $29.95 to find out. For that subscription price, the site offers genealogies and biographies of "all U.S. Presidents, all U.S. Vice Presidents, and all Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and U.S. Constitution." They're beginning to add pedigrees of colonial and state governors, and promise "hundreds of other genealogies."

The family trees and biographies are given as PDF files, so you'll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. Based on the samples provided, the subscription price seems steep for the information offered (it goes up to $34.95 after Presidents' Day). Only paternal lines are traced "back to the boat," and even then with scant detail. Descending lines are not traced. No sources are cited, listed, or hinted at.

The pedigrees are useful in showing the genetic relationships that existed between the leading colonial families, but for anyone hoping to flesh out a family history will prove insufficient. Most of these families are well documented in print (families with illustrious members generally are), so a trip to a library with a good genealogy collection should be first on the to-do list.

Put "Subscribe to Political Family Tree" further down on the list—right below "Clean the gutters."

Monday, January 30, 2006

Dave at OakvilleBlackWalnut blogged today about a newspaper article mentioning "that obituaries are read over the air on a rural radio station" in Missouri.

This led me to KCRW—a Public Radio station in Santa Monica, California, that broadcasts Final Curtain once a month.

Interesting people die every day -- some we've heard of, some we haven't. And every newspaper has an obituary page to chronicle these passings. There's been nothing like the Obit Page on radio or TV -- until now.

KCRW (89.9 FM and KCRW.com) launches what's believed to be a broadcast first: Final Curtain, a monthly half-hour obituary program. It will air the first Tuesday of every month.

Produced and hosted by Perri Chasin and Forrest Murray, Final Curtain will focus on the one thing that unites all living beings -- our demise.

Final Curtain will, of course, deal with people of fame, infamy and notoriety. But it will also feature lesser-knowns whose stories are no less interesting. And it will examine the traditions of death in different cultures.

You can listen to a simulcast at the time of broadcast, or to a podcast anytime (the most recently archived show is from Aug. 2, 2005). They even sell copies on CD—the perfect gift for the person in your life whom everyone else finds really creepy.

If ever there was a time to tape American Idol and watch something else, this Wednesday is it.

On second thought, maybe it’s best that the PBS two-part series African American Lives (airing 9 to 11 p.m. Feb. 1 and 8) is stored on your TiVo as a permanent reference guide, as host Dr. Henry Louis Gates meticulously explains the process of tracing one’s family heritage back to its roots in Africa using as examples eight prominent black Americans, including Oprah Winfrey and Bishop T.D. Jakes.

[snip]

“It’s one thing to hear a lecture about the double helix and Watson and Crick. It’s another thing learning that if you swab yourself 20 times on each cheek, in three weeks, somebody will send you back a card saying, ‘Your ancestor came from Nigeria, and more specifically from the Ebo people,’” says Gates of a new program offering buyers of a DNA kit a chance to mail in their swabs and pinpoint their origin.

“Who wants dusty ol’ research in dusty ol’ archives? If you could produce your lineage back to slavery, back to the American Revolution, wouldn’t that be more compelling? I think that that’s what we’ve been able to achieve.”

Do you have dry, flaky earwax or the gooey, stinky type? The answer is partly in your heritage.

A new study reveals that the gene responsible for the drier type originated in an ancient Northeastern Asian population.

Today, 80 to 95 percent of East Asians have dry earwax, whereas the wet variety is abundant in people of African and European ancestry (97 to 100 percent).

Populations in Southern Asia, the Pacific Islands, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and Native North Americans and Inuit of Asian ancestry, fall in the middle with dry wax frequencies ranging from 30 to 50 percent.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

It is connecting lost cousins and giving families surprising glimpses into their pasts. Now scientists are using it to answer the oldest question of all: where did we come from?

By Claudia KalbNewsweek

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - Brian Hamman had always wondered: what was up with his great-grandfather Lester? Hamman, an avid genealogist, could trace his patrilineal line back to 19th-century rural Indiana, but there was a glitch in the family records. Great-Grandpa Lester, the documents showed, was born before his parents were married. So was Lester really a Hamman? Was Brian? Three years ago DNA tests confirmed the lineage and a simple family mystery was solved: Lester's parents had hooked up before they walked down the aisle on July 25, 1898. Lester was indeed a Hamman, and so is Brian. "I'm delighted," he says.

It’s easy to get your hands on a birth certificate ... even the First Minister’s

Holes in the system

YOU don’t have to get into bed with eastern European gangsters to start your career as an ID thief. In fact, all you have to do to get the ball rolling is pop into your local office for registering births, deaths and marriages and start culling easily available personal documents.

It took the Sunday Herald about half and hour and less than £50 to get hold of the birth certificates of two dead children ... and Jack McConnell, Scotland’s First Minister. With these documents, the Sunday Herald could have begun hijacking the identities of the dead children and started to assume the identity of the First Minister, wreaking havoc in his financial life.

Before you get started, you'll have to download a Java applet (it took a couple of tries on my PC with WinXP running Firefox). You can then execute your search, making either a simple or advanced search.

With Simple Search, you can enter only first and last name. With Advanced Search, you can narrow down your results using date and place of birth and death, and sex. You can also specify the class of records to search (birth records, criminal records, immigration, etc.), or which of 431 databases to query (Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, GenCircles, RootsWeb, etc.).

As with other genealogy search engines, MyHeritage Search allows you to search by the exact spelling of a surname, or with Soundex enabled. What sets it apart is Megadex—a new, proprietary alternative to Soundex. With Megadex selected, you'll be offered 30 variants of the surname, of which you'll be asked to choose as many as ten before proceeding.

Search results are given as a list of websites in no discernible order (they can be resorted by database name or number of matches). A preview image of each website is shown, with the number of matches and a link to the relevant site. Some have an "Expand" option, which calls up an expanded summary of the search results.

The site still has some bugs to work out—when I went back to try a second surname with Megadex enabled, I was greeted by a blank screen instead of a list of variants. Nevertheless, MyHeritage Search does offer a valuable alternative to the Googlers among us. And with the introduction of its genealogy face-recognition tools and a free family-tree application just around the corner, MyHeritage.com is certainly a bookmark-worthy site.

Update: I neglected to cite some "coming attractions" Hagit Katzenelson of MyHeritage.com mentioned in an email today:

We’re also planning to launch a few other search-related features very soon.

The first will allow registered members to save and annotate their searches. Each search can be saved, sites already visited will be marked, and users can annotate each set of matches, i.e. for each spelling variant in each database. Another feature is to display, per surname, which other members (per each member’s agreement) have searched for that name. This will connect between people searching for the same names. We are also working on a feature that automatically re-runs your saved searches and lets you know if new matches have been found.

Friday, January 27, 2006

If you're wondering how to fit someone into your family tree who doesn't really belong—like Grandpa's "housekeeper" who never seems to do any vacuuming—check out the Star Wars Family Tree at Amazon.com. You'll learn that even Wookiees and droids have a place in the modern intergalactic family.

"When these carping critics show me they can raise nearly £6 million over 30 years and create a thriving business out of a graveyard abandoned by its owners and Camden Council then they will be worth listening to."

[snip]

Baron Jozsef von Treuenburg claims he was stopped from visiting the grave of his ancestor Frederick Biscoe Basevi at the Cemetery in Swains Lane 10 years ago.

Baron von Treuenburg, who is 74 and lives in Fortis Green, said: "A lady told me that I can't come to the grave unless I was named on the will."

BEIJING, Jan. 26 (Xinhuanet) -- At least 100,000 Chinese people, about the population of a small city, share the same name -- "Wang Tao", probably the most common name in China.

These Wang Taos include both men and women, commoners and celebrities. The popular ones consist of a top ping pong player, at least two footballers, noted painters, photographers and an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Although [Ed] Rice wrote "Baseball's First Indian-Louis Sockalexis: Penobscot Legend, Cleveland Indian" to make a case for Sockalexis [as the first American Indian to play major league baseball], he did not have solid proof that the Penobscot Indian was the first. He believes he has that now in the form of the 1919 death certificate of James Madison Toy, who is currently recognized as the first American Indian to play professionally.

[snip]

Rice found he could get a copy of Toy's death certificate, but only if he was related to Toy. He marked on the form that he was kin and submitted it electronically to the records department. When an official called a few hours later to find out how he was related to Toy, Rice lied and said he was a great-great cousin in Maine.

"I just took a deep breath and thought, if there's a record, God, why aren't I entitled to get it out there into the public domain?" Rice said. "I don't see that I'm doing harm other than I'm trying to get my hands on a record once and for all."

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Glen Kimball has been researching his family tree for only a few weeks, but already has made a discovery that will rock the genealogical world.

"There's something wrong with the censuses," he says from his home in Alexandria, Virginia. "There's something terribly, terribly wrong with the censuses."

Last week, Kimball found his great-grandfather in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 federal censuses. But the ages given for his ancestor didn't add up.

"He was three years old in 1900, twelve in 1910, and twenty-four in 1920. That's just not possible."

Concerned that other genealogists might be led astray by faulty census data, Kimball immediately contacted the National Archives and notified them of the problem.

"We were very glad to hear from Glen," says RoseAnn Polensky, who runs the Historical Census Department at the Archives. "We would never knowingly release false information to the public. This must have just slipped by our fact-checkers."

On Monday, the Archives announced a recall of all United States census microfilm, which includes records dating from 1790 to 1930. Companies like Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest Online have pledged to take down any census records found to be erroneous.

Polensky notes that Glen Kimball's action has sparked an internal review at the Archives.

"Could other bad information have gotten through? We don't know yet. Until we can look at every document in our possession and check its veracity, we won't be allowing the public access to anything.

"The first document to be released will be the Declaration of Independence," adds Polensky, "just as soon as we verify that all men are created equal."

But one story that many of the cemetery's visitors who don't go by the last name Daniel find more intriguing is the tale of how the decades-old little graveyard that once sat on the edge of a plum orchard ended up only paces away from the Hilton Suites in Brentwood.

"The question I get asked a lot of times is how did your family get buried in the lawn of the Hilton," Daniel, 75, said. "The real question is, how'd the Hilton end up in my family's graveyard?"

Are you a Midwesterner who's only recently discovered your Scandinavian heritage and, in order to frustrate your lonely and otherwise unfulfilled existence, picked up the study of your ancestors' language to connect with your past? Have you progressed beyond level 2? Do you want $20 to renew your subscription on geneology.com for the month of Jan?

[snip]

I will send you a tape, and all you have to do is transcribe the lyrics of the songs on it for me. No translation needed; I just need the lyrics in Swedish. And in return you receive a rather tame compensation ($20) but, considering that all you have to do is listen to music for 40 mins, will probably be the easiest $20 ever earned in the history of Swedish knowledge (finding lost wallets on the streets of Stockholm doesn't count).

Monday, January 23, 2006

The proud lineage of President Abraham Lincoln has helped researchers at the University of Minnesota identify a genetic origin of ataxia, a disease that robs people of mobility and coordination.

[snip]

The research simply put a name to something Lincoln descendants already knew: They were more prone to a mysterious ailment. One branch of the family had previously called it the "dreaded Lincoln disease," said Laurie Crary, a 50-year-old who is Lincoln's sixth cousin. Crary, of Prescott, Ariz., isn't as affected as her father, but she and her sister experience vertigo and lose their sense of balance in the dark.

Don't invite Ted Dorman to any Super Bowl parties this year. He's going to be there in person, thanks to his addiction to online sweepstakes.

Dorman, 61, is the national grand prize winner of the Doritos brand "Crunch Your Way to the Super Bowl" online sweepstakes.

[snip]

[After retiring, Dorman] started working on his family tree, then started researching his wife's family tree.

"I was spending a lot of time on the computer," he said. "There are games and stuff on there, so I started messing around with them. One thing leads to another and now I spend about one and one-half hours entering contests --- but only the ones that are free."

Matchmaker Randy Haines has figured out a new way to link up single men and women. Instead of asking them a long list of questions to deduce and compare their personality traits, Haines simply asks for their last names.

"The key to my approach is simplicity," Haines tells The Genealogue. "Who wants to fill out a questionnaire when love is on his mind?"

Once Haines has a client's surname, he feeds it into a special computer program he calls "Foundex," which generates a code consisting of a letter followed by three numbers. Any man and woman sharing the same Foundex code are meant for each another.

"I've had many successes," says Haines. "One couple even got married. Just last week Cindy Collins and Bill Collings tied the knot in Vegas. They sent me pictures."

Not all of his clients are as happy as Bill and Cindy. Some have threatened to sue after being set up with their own siblings or first-cousins. One man was set up with his ex-wife. Haines acknowledges that mistakes do happen.

"Foundex isn't perfect, but neither is love. And love doesn't come with a coupon for free genetic counseling."

Sunday, January 22, 2006

UXBRIDGE -- A father's dying wish for his daughter to get married was granted while he lay in his hospital bed.

But while the couple said "I do", the government says they didn't do everything by the book, citing the lack of a marriage licence. As a result, a marriage certificate for Teresa Holden and John Jacobsen, who live at the Uxbridge/Scugog border, is being denied by the provincial registrar's office.

The decision has left the newlyweds in legal limbo, as the Province still appears to have declared the marriage valid in a letter to the couple's lawyer.

"Because we didn't have a licence before we got married, we can't get one now. Because we can't get one now, we can't get a marriage certificate," Ms. Holden said. "We can't get divorced, even if we wanted to. We can't get re-married either."

Genealogists ferret out names from East St. Louis Catholic high schools

BY TERI MADDOXNews-Democrat

It's not a literary page-turner, but then authors Sandi Bennett and Judy Jennings never intended it to be.

Their new book, "The Graduating Classes of the Closed Catholic High Schools, East St. Louis, Illinois, 1894 thru 1989" falls into the "reference" category.

Bennett and Jennings list nearly 10,000 students who graduated from St. Teresa Academy, Central Catholic High School, Assumption High School and St. Mary's High School, along with their parishes or hometowns.

"The main thing is, it will help people with their genealogies," said Jennings, 41, of Belleville, a 1982 graduate of Althoff Catholic High School in Belleville.

Friday, January 20, 2006

This looks to be a good year for African American genealogy. The National Archives recently announced that Freedmen's Bureau records will be made more readily available to researchers. PBS will soon broadcast African American Lives, in which eight famous Americans are presented with their family trees. Ancestry.com is creating a new "African American History Center," and will be offering 13 relevant databases free to the public throughout the month of February. African Ancestry, Inc., is making news for its DNA tracking service, which has traced the ancestries of more than 4,000 families back to specific countries and cultural groups in Africa.

And I've just noticed that HeritageQuest Online has put online some records they've been promising: The Registers of Signatures of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, 1865-1874.

The information contained in many of the registers is as follows: account number, name of depositor, date of entry, place born, place brought up, residence, age, complexion, name of employer or occupation, wife or husband, children, father, mother, brothers and sisters, remarks, and signature. The early books sometimes also contain the name of the former master or mistress and the name of the plantation. In many entries not all the requested data are given. Copies of death certificates have been pinned to some of the entries. In each case the certificate has been filmed immediately after the page that shows the registration of the person's signature.

Emil Monhardt, the great-great-great grandson of “Silent Night” composer Franz Gruber died in his sleep Tuesday. The retired electrician charmed visitors at Gramercy Hill at Christmastime with German renditions of his ancestor’s tune. This December he was featured in a column in the Lincoln Journal Star.

His voice wasn’t too strong anymore, he told the paper.

“I sing it so much, it’s just about too old,” he said. “People get tired of it.”

Thursday, January 19, 2006

For the 57th year running, a mystery man today paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his birthday.

Some of the 25 spectators drawn to a tiny, locked graveyard in downtown Baltimore for the ceremony climbed over the walls of the site and were "running all over the place trying to find out how the guy gets in", according to Jeff Jerome, the most faithful viewer of the event.

Mr Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, said he had to chase people out of the graveyard, fearing they would interfere with the mystery visitor's ceremony.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

After the election next Monday, the losing federal leaders may want to just slip away somewhere. Now, a Canadian airline is going to make a little easier for them -- or for anyone who shares their last name for that matter.

WestJet Airlines Ltd. is offering anyone with the surname Martin, Harper, Layton, Duceppe, or Harris an opportunity to get a free domestic fare on the day following the Jan. 23 election.

It seems that a monument commemorating the location of the former town of Indianola — "a vital port in German immigration to Texas" — has been altered by the addition of a bench.The bench is so oddly positioned that anyone attempting to both sit on the bench and read the inscription on the monument risks a nasty case of whiplash. The bench does, however, provide an excellent vantage for observing tourists who've come to see the monument. Or the bench.

I have been a proponent of sitting for many years, and cannot help but wonder why they would keep this ostentatious monument — which obviously distracts from the beauty and utility of the bench. The monument was erected in 1936, and has served its purpose. Let's knock it down, and install more benches.

WOULD the real relative of the legendary Wild Man of Macclesfield please stand up?

After the Macclesfield Express went in search of the legend behind a local giant who was transported to Australia, escaped and became an Aboriginal chief for 30 years – we thought we would be lucky to find one living relative.

But, like London buses, three came along at once!

[snip]

Margaret Windelinckx, 64, of Chelford Road, Macclesfield, was the first person to come forward as a potential relative, and is the one candidate who has traced her family tree – originally from Belgium – the furthest back to William.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Actor George Clooney baffled the audience at the 2006 Golden Globes last night when he began laying out his genealogy during an acceptance speech.

"Rosemary Clooney was my aunt," explained Clooney. "Now, her first husband was José Ferrer, and their kids are my first cousins. Didn't Miguel get nominated for Crossing Jordan this year? No? Anyway, Miguel's brother Rafael Ferrer is married to Debby Boone, who's Pat Boone's daughter, of course, but also the granddaughter of Red Foley, who used to appear on the Grand Old Opry."

The music then started up, signaling that it was time for Clooney to step off the stage. But he was just getting started.

"My ex-wife, Talia Balsam, was the daughter of Martin Balsam and Joyce Van Patten, so she's the niece of Dick Van Patten, and a cousin to Vince and the others. But let's get back to my father, Nick, who's the descendant of an Irish immigrant to Kentucky."

As Clooney pulled a folded family tree chart from the pocket of his tuxedo, two security guards wearing NBC name tags tackled him and dragged him offstage. To the dismay of those trying to keep the show on schedule, the audience responded with a standing ovation that lasted four full minutes.

UK Orders Registry offices to Remove All References to “Marriage” due to Civil Partnerships

By Gudrun Schultz

UNITED KINGDOM, England, January 16, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Registry offices in the UK are taking down all signs referring to “marriage.” The Government has advised regional councils to change sign wording in case gay couples are offended. Homosexual relationships can now be registered as Civil Partnerships, under the UK’s new legislation.

[snip]

The Government-issued Civil Partnership checklist, which contains the signage recommendations, also suggests registry offices change the heading of their stationary packages from “Your Wedding” to “Your Ceremony.”

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Scientists in Ireland may have found the country's most fertile male, with more than 3 million men worldwide among his offspring.

The scientists, from Trinity College Dublin, have discovered that as many as one in twelve Irish men could be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th-century warlord who was head of the most powerful dynasty in ancient Ireland.

His genetic legacy is almost as impressive as Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered most of Asia in the 13th century and has nearly 16 million descendants, said Dan Bradley, who supervised the research.

Monday, January 16, 2006

SHENYANG, Jan. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Twenty-five Chinese records went into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2005, sources with China's submitting office said Monday.

[snip]

The Confucius family genealogy, one of the 25 records, is considered the longest of its kind in world records. Dating back 2,800 years, it clearly records the 86 generations of the Confucius family tree.

Tafadzwa and Tapiwanashe Fichiani, 22, returned recently from 2 1/2 years in Britain vowing to promote an authentically African lifestyle, the Sunday Mail reported.

[snip]

"We do not care what people say or think about us because we regard them as colonized," his brother, Tapiwanashe, was quoted as saying. "Why do they laugh at someone wearing nhembe, yet their ancestors wore nhembe before they were colonized?"

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Spanish scientists are to test the DNA of hundreds of Catalans with the surname Colom to prove that Christopher Columbus, far from the Italian gentleman he has long been believed to be, was in fact a pirate born in Catalonia.

The experiment, in determining whether any of the participants are related to the explorer, is designed to clarify the disputed origins of the man who made landfall in America in 1492. While historians have mostly reckoned he was born in Genoa in 1451, a counter-lobby argues that he was the Catalan Cristofol Colom, who airbrushed his past to conceal activities as a pirate and conspirator against the king.

If you happen to carry around one of Britain's top 25,000 surnames, head over to the Surname Profiler—a new database that shows the origins of names, and maps their frequency and geographical distribution in the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If your name isn't included, try again later: they'll be adding another 250,000 in the future.

Searching for my own surname, I find that "Dunham" is very popular in Tasmania, which explains why my mail always end up there. In the U.S., the state with the highest rate of Dunhamhood is Maine—which happens to be the state where I keep my toothbrush. The rate of Dunhamhood in my bedroom on any given night is dizzyingly high.

The website also tells me that 22% of people have "a more rural name," while only 16% have "a more high-status name." I think that means that I'm more likely to be condescending than condescended to.

The best part of using the website was discovering that we Dunhams are a multiethnic family. Sure, 98.72% of us are classified as "English or unknown," but 0.12% are Greek or Greek Cypriot, 0.06% are Hispanic, 0.17% are Black African, 0.06% are Indian, and 0.23% are Muslims of some sort. We're almost as multiethnic as the U.S. Senate!

Friday, January 13, 2006

Reno, Nev. (AP) -- There's no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday.

Cannibalism has been documented at the Sierra Nevada site where most of the Donner Party's 81 members were trapped during the brutal winter of 1846-47, but 21 people, including all the members of the George and Jacob Donner families, were stuck six miles away because a broken axle had delayed them.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and Robb Wells, better known to Canadians as Ricky on Trailer Park Boys, are cousins.

We are not making this up.

These two men are descendents of the same great-great-great-great-great grandfather, George Dobson.

[snip]

For those Canadians who may not know, Mr. Robb is the potato chip and pepperoni-stick-consuming character living in his car in Nova Scotia's fictional Sunnyvale trailer park.

[snip]

Mr. Harper is the serious-minded, policy-wonkish politician who lives at Stornoway, the official mansion of the opposition leader, but would like to be living soon at 24 Sussex Dr., the Prime Minister's official residence.

People who describe their ethnicity as "New Zealander" or "Kiwi" will have their answers recorded in the main Census for the first time this year.

Statistics New Zealand chief demographer Mansoor Khawaja says he is ready to bow to public opinion and stop classifying people who give these answers to the Census ethnicity question under the official category "New Zealand European".

The department has also abandoned a controversial system, used since 1986, of "prioritising" the ethnic origins of people with mixed ancestry.

People who tick both the "New Zealand European" and "Maori" boxes, for example, will now be counted as belonging to both groups, so the total of all ethnic groups will add up to more than 100 per cent of the population.

There could be growing gaps in Morgan County's public records, according to county historian Sam Cline, if the proper process is not followed in storing, reviewing, microfilming and destroying them.

It concerns him that in 1969 and again in 2005, old record books were thrown into a dumpster for disposal and burning.

[snip]

In the 1960s, Cline was doing research in the Morgan County Recorder's office in the courthouse. Thelma Gray was Recorder at the time. She showed him a sight that still haunts him - a room on the third floor where people had merely opened the door and started throwing county records into it.

"I picked up a small book with a real leather cover and no information on the spine or cover and I opened it. The book was the original 1847 tax records for Morgan County," Cline said.

GRAVEYARDS are a fascinating gateway into the extraordinarily diverse lives of the men and women who have found themselves - by accident or design - in the capital city of Scotland.

[snip]

The cemetery is also home to gunsmith Thomas Leslie, who went to inspect the pistol with which the well-known geologist and writer Hugh Miller had committed suicide the day before in Portobello while tormented by brain disease. The revolver, rusted from lying overnight in Miller's bath, was taken to the gunsmith who had sold it to discover how many bullets had been fired. The gun was handed over to the foreman, Thomas Leslie, with the spoken words "Mind, it is loaded". Leslie examined the rusty safety-catch. He held it up to his eye and lifted the hammer to count the bullets. At that instant the pistol went off, blowing his brains out. Leslie, who had eight children and had worked with guns for 25 years, was buried in the Grange Cemetery a little earlier on the same day as Miller.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Dave at OakvilleBlackWalnut blogged yesterday about something near and dear to my heart — and to every other internal organ I possess. Suffice to say, if you've ever wondered whether your ancestors had tattoos, you might want to check the shelves of your local library.

Dear Genealogue,My local library won't allow me to photocopy a couple of fragile books, and there's too much information in them to copy by hand. How can I get the information I need without violating the library's policy?

Doug in Rockville, CT

First, buy yourself a digital camera. There are several affordable models available these days. Next, catch the head librarian in a compromising position — preferably something involving the mayor and his paper boy — and snap a few pictures. With these photos in hand, you should find the library's policies much more flexible on your next visit.

Dear Genealogue,I'm stumped. My gr-gr-gr-grandfather seems to have dropped off the face of the planet sometime after the 1880 census. I can't find a death record or a gravestone, and I can't find him in any later census. Any ideas?

Stanley in Greeley, CO

Your ancestor may have changed his name to "Sally," joined a transvestite minstrel show which toured the western United States (to mixed reviews) in the late 19th century, and been beaten to death with a riding crop after inflaming the passions of a young Teddy Roosevelt.

Of course, this is just a guess.

Dear Genealogue,What's the proper way to store daguerreotype photographs?

Renee Zamora is beta testing a new feature at FamilySearch called Family Tree — sort of like OneGreatFamily with an LDS feel. You'll be able to log in, upload your GEDCOM, and let Family Tree merge your data with data from the IGI, Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File.

FamilySearch has the best merge function I have ever seen. I just love this feature. It will give you the number of possible matches and present five at a time. Instead of choosing who to make primary and what information to keep it will automatically combine all information together. All the birth or death opinions will be listed together in their separate fields. But the neat thing is you can delete your merge! Now I haven’t seen any genealogy software program do that yet.

What I find most promising is the way disputed information is handled.

It is now possible for you and your second cousin to have multiple opinions show up on an individual. You have the ability to dispute each other’s information and note the reason for the dispute. But you cannot change each other’s information contributed. There is an icon that will show if information is disputed. All information added will be maintained. You also have the ability to cite your sources.

OUIDAH, Benin -- Thousands gathered on a beach Tuesday to celebrate Benin's once-banned Voodoo, slaughtering animals and welcoming revelers from Brazil and the United States, including descendants of slaves who took the religion to the Americas centuries ago.

At a ceremony in the southern town of Ouidah, Voodoo high priestess Nagbo Hounon Gbeffa sacrificed a goat, a rooster and a chicken as divine offerings.

"I'm very moved," said Faith McDouglas, a 37-year-old nurse from Omaha, Neb. "I've understood many things regarding my origins, because I'm a descendant of slaves."

As the self-described head of the surviving family of Nicholas II, Russia's last czar, Ms. Romanova wants rehabilitation for her ancestors, according to her lawyer. Under Russian law, this would mean a formal admission that Nicholas II was unjustly killed along with his wife, children and attendants after revolution swept away Russia's monarchy.

[snip]

Perhaps most troubling for Ms. Romanova's legal process are the questions posed by experts in Yekaterinburg about her credibility. The birth certificate for czar Nicholas that she submitted as part of her application looks as though it could belong to anybody, said Vadim Viner, a businessman from Yekaterinburg who has been researching the death of the Romanovs for 17 years.

"She probably got the certificate from some homeless person whose name was Nicholas," Mr. Viner said, slouching in a badly rumpled three-piece suit in his small, dark office.

Women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy celebrated the 100th year anniversary of the local area chapter in Portales on Friday.

[snip]

“It’s a moment of great pride and honor to be a member and to honor my ancestry,” Jane Hilliard of Portales said. “We don’t take part in the political aspect of it (the Civil War). We’re not trying to rewrite the war. We are simply searching for the history.”

NORMAN, Okla. - For a number of years, Greg Boyd, author of the new book “Family Maps of Newton County, Missouri” wanted to know about his family's past.

[snip]

With his love of genealogy and wanting to find out more, he developed computer programs that literally work around the clock.

“They scan various genealogy and non-genealogy Web sites, much like Google or Yahoo's ‘spiders' do,” Greg said. “And they store information on servers at our headquarters. Captured data goes into databases of my design, so the ‘sorting' out of data is largely done at the time the information is gathered.”

Saturday, January 07, 2006

"I WORK WITH Civil War remains more than anyone out there," said Dr. Douglas W. Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution.

[snip]

One of those sailors [on the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley] who might have descendants alive today was none other than Fredericksburg's own Frank Collins. The body of a suspected maternal relative, Edward Clarke Gosnell (1853-1929) was exhumed in 2004 to retrieve some DNA that could be tested against material recovered from Collins' body to see if the men were related. Gosnell has known living relatives.

Owsley showed pictures of the cemetery where Gosnell's grave was opened with the family's permission. Owsley recalled that as he crawled over the opened casket to cut Gosnell's trouser leg to get a sample of bone marrow from the man's thigh bone, the lid fell on him, pushing him partly into the casket with the body. Owsley said this was quite an experience. But he did retrieve the sample he wanted.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Frank Russell was poking around his attic last week, and came upon a historical treasure.

"It was stuffed down inside a wall cavity, as if someone had hidden it there," says Russell, a supermarket manager in Utica, N. Y. "When I pulled it out, I saw that it might be valuable."

The ledger Russell extracted was even more valuable than he had hoped. Inside were the business records of his own great-grandfather, who ran a boarding house in Utica during the Depression.

"His name was Samuel G. Handy," according to Russell. "It appears that he opened his home to young, unmarried women after his wife died in 1931. He must have done it as a public service, because I can't see that they ever paid him rent."

Handy's ledger does show some other payments — made by men from Utica and surrounding towns. This puzzles Russell.

"It doesn't say why they were giving him money. Whatever Sam was providing, it must have left those guys satisfied. The same names keep showing up week after week — some of the most prominent men in town are in there."

When news of the ledger's existence surfaced, members of the Utica Genealogical Society showed up at Russell's door, asking to view his discovery. Before they left, they offered to purchase the book for a large sum.

"They were very eager to get their hands on it," he brags. "Once they saw their own relatives' names in there, they knew they had to have it."

But Russell isn't ready to part with the ledger.

"This is a part of my family's history, so I want to keep hold of it. It'll be displayed in my dining room, right next to great-grandfather Handy's sex-toy collection."